try to comfort me! I've always,
_always_ been like this. I cannot help it. Whenever I care for
anybody--oh, it never made any difference whether I had any right to
care or to be jealous! I just was; and it hurts!" She put her hands
suddenly over her heart and began to speak rapidly, as a child does when
accumulated trouble makes silence no longer possible. "I hated her when
I saw she was with you; far up the road, when I only knew she was a
woman; and when I saw her nearer I hated her more. She is so pretty,"
she explained. "Are you going to marry her?" she demanded.

"Not exactly," he answered, grimly.

"Good-bye!" she cried, dropping down the river-bank to the skiff.

"Katrine!" he called.

"I'm not coming back!" she cried through the bushes. "I'm never coming
back! Good-bye!"

Two days later there came from Ravenel House a polite note, cordial by
the book, asking that Miss Dulany come to them for dinner on the fifth;
and, it added, perhaps Miss Dulany might give them an opportunity to
hear her charming voice. It was written in the quaint, old-fashioned
hand of Mrs. Ravenel.

Katrine read it with a curious smile around her lips, answering while
the messenger waited. She "regretted extremely that a cold"; she paused
a minute in the writing to reflect on the way the cold had come; sitting
one damp afternoon in the rose-garden with the son of the writer of this
extremely polite invitation; "regretted extremely that this cold, which
seemed more persistent than such things generally were, prevented her
accepting Mrs. Ravenel's most kind invitation."

The third meeting was an intentional one on Frank's part. The people at
Ravenel had become unbearable, and with no thought save for Katrine's
society, he took a short cut through the laurel trees, crossed the river
in his canoe, and entered the lodge garden to find her sitting on the
broad steps of the house, her chin resting in her hands. There was an
exaltation in her little being, an alluring remoteness, an entire
concentration upon her own thoughts, which one sees in a child; and when
one saw her thus, dreaming hillward, one knew there were great ongoings
in that dusky head of hers.

At sight of him she bowed gravely, moving that he might have nearly all
the rug upon which she had been sitting, not minding the stones for
herself in the least. Her careless generosity spoke even in this
trifling act.

"You are bored?" she asked, after a silence which he seemed di